Jeremy D Vance Author

    If you’re starting out as a writer, you may be overwhelmed with the flood of new lingo you’ve had to assimilate. One of these phrases may be “Dialogue tags.”  Just what are these?     Remember when you were a kid and you had those tags on the back of your shirt?  In order to identify your clothes, your mom would write your name on those tags so your shirts wouldn’t get confused with someone else’s. Those tags with your name identified those clothes as yours.      In a similar way, dialogue tags identify who is speaking and sometimes how they are speaking.      It may be as simple as a           He said , “My sling will protect me..”      Or a little more specific like this           She whispered , “I have sword skills.”            My struggle with dialogue tags involved finding different words each time to make the story interesting or so I thought. Then I began finding out from different articles I read that except for the “said” tag, other tags can be distra